Kerry wants Law Library report on Honduras retracted

posted at 10:55 am on October 29, 2009 by Ed Morrissey

A month ago, the Law Library of Congress reviewed the removal of Manuel Zelaya from his post as President of Honduras, an act that the Obama administration called a “coup” and demanded reversed for its illegality. To the embarrassment of the White House and State Department, the Congressional body determined that Honduras acted lawfully in removing Zelaya for his crimes against their constitution, although they determined that his exile broke Honduran law. Now John Kerry wants the Law Library to retract its findings, apparently trying to rewrite history to hide the facts of the case:

The chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees are asking the Law Library of Congress to retract a report on the military-backed coup in Honduras that they charge is flawed and “has contributed to the political crisis that still wracks” the country.

The request, by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., has sparked cries of censorship from Republicans who say the Democrats don’t like what the August report said: that the government of Honduras had the authority to remove President Manuel Zelaya from office.

Zelaya has been holed up at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa for several weeks, and high-ranking U.S. officials arrived Wednesday to try to broker a resolution.

Critics of the Obama administration — which condemned Zelaya’s removal in June — have pointed to the report as evidence that the White House was wrong when it sided with most Latin American countries in calling for Zelaya to be returned.

The report did nothing to contribute to the political crisis in Honduras. Most Hondurans are probably unaware of the report, and would hardly consider it a priority in their lives, what with the rest of the political questions in the air at the moment. The only political “crisis” that the report stoked was the one in the US, when people wondered why we were suddenly taking the same side as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro brothers against one of the more stalwart US allies in the region.

What has contributed most to the political crisis in Honduras? The wrongheaded stance of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They have suspended visas and aid to Honduras, weakening one of the few strong alliances we have in Central America, just to interfere with what is truly an internal matter in Tegulcigapa. The US has rejected the one real solution to the problem, a national election that had already been scheduled before Zelaya’s removal and one in which Zelaya’s own party wants to participate.

If Kerry and Berman want a resolution to the Honduran crisis, then they should be demanding changes from Obama and his team, not silence from the Law Library of Congress.

Blowback

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Well in all fairness the Hondurans did act like the hordes of Gengis Khan. Prolly cut off ears and thumbs and stuff, rampaged through the countryside broke down doors and terrified women and children. You know things like that. They were, after all, just uneducated military folk stuck in the only jobs they were qualified for. /sarc

I revere John Kerry just ever so slightly above Jane Fonda. I think he should go down there and throw somebody’s medals over a fence.

If Kerry and Berman want a resolution to the Honduran crisis, then they should be demanding changes from Obama and his team, not silence from the Law Library of Congress.

But we’ve always been at war with Eastasia…..

Seriously, this is looking more and more like 1984 now complete with memory holes and state-mandated behaviors. I guess the only real surprise is that it turns out that Big Brother really is a brother.

John Kerry’s incompetence is exceeded only by his arrogance which is exceeded only by his amorality. And, let me be clear, I am speaking only of John Kerry. And I am not threatening or intending any violence against him, but, if somehow, in an alternate universe -some reality other than our own- he were my company commander or platoon leader, I would shoot his ass.

Instead of fixing a mistake or owning up to it yet again this administration and it’s cronies are just covering up another mistake. If they don’t like an outcome of a decision they just lie about it and hope the reporters do there job and cover exactly what they say, not the truth. What happened to bringing transparency and responsibility to the White House?

This type of stuff was in the news when Louis Fisher worked at CRS. A Republican congressmen criticized Fisher for something he said or wrote. CRS eventually pushed him out and now he’s at the Law Library.

John the flip-flopper “I voted for it before I voted against it” Kerry wants the LOC to issue an “inconclusive version of the paper.”

notropis on October 29, 2009 at 11:02 AM

John Kerry gets a lot of heat for that vote. What gets lost in translation is that procedurely his votes made perfect sense. Where he is rightfully attacked is the fact that he is so disconnected from the public he didn’t understand how his inside-the-beltway comment was recieved by the little people. Even though I did not support his candidacy in 2004, I would willingly take his presidency today over the filthy lying coward scum that has the job at present.

Ed! I didn’t realize how much I’d miss you and TEMS, although I got a chance to look at other UStream offerings like the PENTAGON channel, and I learned a LOT within an hour.

I had NO idea, for example, that 95% of Afgans are illiterate. That’s about the toughest nut to crack — illiteracy.

Now to Honduras. When politicians see everything through a local-political lens, like Kerry and that other Democrat obviously does, how in the world are we to actually help anyone, like Hondurans or Afgans. I don’t think it is possible.

We need to see a regime change — ONE TERM TERM LIMITS ON CONGRESS! Throw the bums out. It couldn’t be worse, so ANYTHING would be an improvement on the status quo there.

If I waxed to philosophical, it’s because our country is in debt up to our necks, and it’s time to change horses. We need a grassroots movement to change the law to SINGLE terms in Congress, no pay, no retirement benefits. We need people there who WANT to serve…. others…. not themselves.

So, Kerry wants to Swift Boat the Law Library of Congress. Any thoughts there Sen. Also, Sen. any thopughts on the incompetence of the Odumbo adm to have enough swine flu vaccine(like your attack on the Bush adm.)

If Honduras manages to preserve its democracy despite U.S. pressure to abandon it, the tiny Central American country may wind up thanking Nicaragua’s Danny Ortega, of all people.

Last week, President Ortega inadvertently provided the best defense yet of the Honduran decision this summer to remove Manuel Zelaya from the presidency. Nicaragua has a one-term limit for presidents, and Mr. Ortega’s term expires in 2011. However, the Nicaraguan doesn’t want to leave, and so he asked the Sandinista-controlled Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional ban on his re-election.

Last week the court’s constitutional panel obliged him. The Nicaraguan press reported that the vote was held before three opposition judges could reach the chamber in time for the session. Three alternative judges, all Sandinistas, took their place and the court gave Mr. Ortega the green light. Mr. Ortega has decreed that the ruling cannot be appealed.

Kerry seems to be one of Obama’s puppet masters. What a failure of a presidency.

cubachi on October 29, 2009 at 11:02 AM

I’m afraid that may be true when it comes to Central America policy. Kerry was at the center of the debate all through the 1980s about Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. He had ties to the far-left Christic Institute and expressed sympathy for Communist rebels in El Salvador and Honduras. Some of us remember him as a near-seditionist who constantly tried to undermine U.S. policy in the region. I believe Kerry still harbors some sort of inane 1980s longing for a communist revolution throughout Central America.

John Kerry has no right whatsoever to determine what constitutes a democracy. No more than Obama as both are clearly anti-American in everything they say and do. Having Kerry as his laqpdog proves without doubt Obama’s attack on our nation from within will be detriment to us that we many never recover from. A century ago Ariel Durant said,” A great civilization cannot be conquered from within until it destroys itself from within.” Prophetic.

Wow, John Kerry really thinks that Obama’s victory made HIM President, doesn’t he?

Red Cloud on October 29, 2009 at 10:59 AM

As a resident of MA I demand that you provide links to support your outrageous statement. I have lived here the entire time Kerry has been a senator and I have not seen a single shred of evidence that he thinks. Again, I demand proof of your wild claim.

John Kerry has no right whatsoever to determine what constitutes a democracy. No more than Obama as both are clearly anti-American in everything they say and do. Having Kerry as his laqpdog proves without doubt Obama’s attack on our nation from within will be detriment to us that we many never recover from. A century ago Ariel Durant said,” A great civilization cannot be conquered from without until it destroys itself from within.” Prophetic.

John Kerry gets a lot of heat for that vote. What gets lost in translation is that procedurely his votes made perfect sense. Where he is rightfully attacked is the fact that he is so disconnected from the public he didn’t understand how his inside-the-beltway comment was recieved by the little people. Even though I did not support his candidacy in 2004, I would willingly take his presidency today over the filthy lying coward scum that has the job at present.

highhopes on October 29, 2009 at 11:10 AM

Not me. Kerry would have had our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan by now, and he would have sent them in to Honduras to restore Zelaya. Trust me on this – John Kerry would be a far, far more dangerous President than Barack Obama. Kerry has spent 35 years honing his leftist doctrine on use of U.S. military power, appeasing terrorists, and promoting communist revolution in the Third World. He is the same guy who went to Paris in 1973 and met cordially with the communist North Vietnamese and advised them on how to defeat the U.S. in Vietnam.

I spent a great deal of time in 2004 writing and talking to people about how critical it was to the future of the U.S. and the free world that John Kerry never become President. I did not vote for George W. Bush as much as I voted against John Kerry.

John F-in Kerry is showing us what would have happened if he had been elected. He’s living out his failed presidency helping another miserable failure of a President.

suzyk on October 29, 2009 at 11:19 AM

The brain power is staggering is it not? What were their grades in those elite ivy league schools. Oh, that’s right Kerry was lower then that dummy Bush and BO was, well, we don’t know because he has all those records classified or something.

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

Seriously, this is looking more and more like 1984 now complete with memory holes and state-mandated behaviors. I guess the only real surprise is that it turns out that Big Brother really is a brother.

Congress gave themselves the authority to re-write the congressional records decades ago, effectively giving themselves the God-like ability to re-write history. No, wait. Even GOD doesn’t re-write history. Which should demonstrate the level of hubris displayed by our elected representatives and senators.

Canny or not, Kerry has a record on Latin America — a substantial one. You will recall the 1980s, and that decade’s fierce debates over Central America policy. At the heart of these debates was Nicaragua: the Sandinistas, Castro, and the Soviet Union versus the Contras and the United States (or rather, not all of the United States: the Reagan administration, in particular). Kerry was an important player in all this. He was part of a group derided by Republicans as “‘Dear Comandante’ Democrats,” for they would address letters to Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista No. 1, “Dear Comandante.” (“But that’s his title,” they would plead, not unreasonably.) This group included such House members as Mike Barnes and Pete Kostmayer, and such senators as Chris Dodd and Tom Harkin — and John Kerry.

Only months after he was sworn in, Kerry joined Harkin on an infamous trip to Managua, to meet with Comandante Ortega. This was April 1985. The trip, according to an article in Policy Review magazine, was arranged by the Institute for Policy Studies, a hard-Left group. IPS was one of several such groups around Kerry back then. The trip, moreover, occurred a few days before a key vote in Congress on Contra aid — the bill proposed to send $14 million in humanitarian assistance to those anti-Communist rebels.

——————————–

When it came to Latin America policy at large, Kerry almost always ran with the Left crowd, but at least once he stood alone. In December 1985, he was the only senator to vote against money for police training in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. Even Senator Dodd voted for it. Yet another Republican Latin America specialist reflects, “Kerry aligned himself with all the leftist-chic causes, and he was virulently anti-Reagan. And he never apologized for it, never showed any regret, in light of how things have turned out in Central America. I mean, really: In El Salvador, they just had an election in which a tired old leftist guerrilla lost to a conservative candidate. Instead of meeting on the battlefield, they met at the ballot box. Everything was peaceful. The other countries are doing the same thing.” And will Kerry give no credit to the policies he tried to stop?

A disdain for American power has been part and parcel of the senator’s attitude.

He was quite sniffy about the invasion of Grenada, for example. He compared it to “Boston College playing football against the Sisters of Mercy.” (It’s funny how the Democrats were in harmony. Madeleine Albright — the future secretary of state — said, “It was the [Washington] Redskins versus the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the score was 101 to nothing.”) Kerry added, “The invasion of Grenada represents the Reagan policy of substituting public relations for diplomatic relations . . . The invasion represented a bully’s show of force against a weak Third World nation. The invasion only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle U.S.–Soviet and North–South relations.” Ponder that: The possible next president interpreted Grenada as “a bully’s show of force against a weak Third World nation.”

Needless to say, Kerry talks a little differently now. But has he changed his mind, or is he merely the Democratic nominee? For the benefit of South Florida, he’s claiming to be a big anti-Castroite: “I don’t like Fidel Castro. Some people have cottoned to him in our party [now there's an admission!] and go down and visit. I went to Cuba once and I purposely said I don’t want to.” That statement was a little mysterious. Kerry has also said, “I’m pretty tough on Castro, because I think he’s running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist, secret-police government in the world. And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.” That was a little mysterious too, for Kerry was one of only 22 senators to vote against Helms-Burton. His campaign later explained that he had voted for an early version of the bill, objecting to the final one because of Title III: which allows Americans whose property was stolen to sue foreign companies acquiring that property.

Kerry has — or had — long been a critic of U.S. policy on Cuba. In 2000, he said that “the only reason we don’t re-evaluate the policy is the politics of Florida.” Speaking of the politics of Florida: Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a congressman from Miami, says, “I have had to fight consistently against John Kerry for years. Every time there has been an effort to unilaterally provide the Cuban dictatorship with trade financing or tourism dollars, John Kerry has stood” with the unilateralists. Just recently, Kerry had this to say about the return of Elián González to Cuba (Elián was the boy plucked from the ocean): “I didn’t agree with that.” But he had supported the Clinton administration. Kerry, forced to elaborate, said, “I didn’t like the way they did it. I thought the process was butchered.” At the time of the Elián drama, Kerry said, “There’s obviously, now, a fair amount of sort of Cold War rhetoric. I would hope both countries would view this as an opportunity to reach beyond that, to find a new opening of opportunity for how we resolve this kind of issue.” Both countries: the Castro regime and the United States. That’s how John Kerry, pre-nomination, used to talk.

Our two socialist European Senators, war heros, medal winners and failed president wanna be’s and their new concept in transparency. They need to brush up on re-writing history to help explain the coming revolution here and not abroad.

John Kerry’s incompetence is exceeded only by his arrogance which is exceeded only by his amorality. And, let me be clear, I am speaking only of John Kerry. And I am not threatening or intending any violence against him, but, if somehow, in an alternate universe -some reality other than our own- he were my company commander or platoon leader, I would shoot his ass.

Doorgunner on October 29, 2009 at 11:07 AM

Kerry was a fraggin candidate when he was in nam and has only strengthed that position since.What an a**wipe

Who cares about the poor in Honduras and thier lives and freedom if it’s going to embarrass us!!!
Kerry is a despicable dirt bag.
These people are evil, woe to us if and when they consolidate control over this nation.
Don’t be naive, they will enforce their corrupt ways with violence when they are able to.
At that point it will come to blood if we still value of freedom.

I can almost hear the underwhelming silence from the American Library Association, the so-called purveyors of intellectual freedom. They’ll scream bloody-blue murder over the Patriot Act until there’s a regime change. They’ll stay silent about this too.

The only political “crisis” that the report stoked was the one in the US, when people wondered why we were suddenly taking the same side as Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and the Castro brothers against one of the more stalwart US allies in the region.

Why should that surprise anyone? Obama is taking the side of Islam in Afghanistan against his own troops.

I’m still waiting for Kerry’s successful lawsuit against the swiftboaters backed by and supported with millions in leftist donations to his cause.
What?..Never happened and didn’t even try?…I wonder why?

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The statement by the temporary President of Honduras as to why the government had to act was inspiring to me. His country followed their Constitution and laws to the letter. No bullet in the brain for Zelaya when he tried to become the new Castro or Chavez style presidente por vida.
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Too bad Comrade Obama (PBUH) won’t read and follow the U.S. Constitution like the interim Honduran President did. Their upcoming elections will put in an elected president, and the caretaker government will step down. And the U.S. backs another wannabe dictator instead of backing the people. And castigates the people economically by withholding U.S. aid–as we send $900 million to support the HAMAS terrorists instead.
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John Bibb
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and the sad thing is, Sen. Lugar agrees with Kerry and the Obama administration. Several weeks ago when the US first started pressuring the Honduras’ government I called Lugar’s office to complain that our government was attempting to force another government to violate their own constituition by reinstalling Zelya.

In return I recieved a letter from Lugar (form letter, no doubt) thanking me for my interest in his position. He went on to say that he had written a letter to State (Hillary) questioning what the department was doing about the “military coup” and reinstalling Zelya.

I promptly called his office to explain that if he didn’t repect another country’s constituition then how in the h3ll could I expect him to respect ours.

I don’t watch MSM “noos” but I don’t remember this little nugget being ballyhooed about like Zelaya’s ouster was.
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The refusal of MSM to cover stuff like is what makes MSM compliant in leftist take-overs and authoritarian hegemony. Am I incorrect in missing the MSM reporting of this Ortega power grab? Did they report it?